Dear Friend,
My homework for seminary this month is to write my own personal code of ethics.
Casual. Light lift. No big deal.
If you’re new to Make The Sun, I’ve been in ‘school’ for the past two years, studying and practicing to become an interfaith minister. And now I’m 24 days away from ordination, which feels both deeply meaningful and slightly surreal, depending on the hour.
The beautiful and humbling thing about homework in ministry is that if you rush it or cheat it, you’re the one who has to live with the result. Which, as it turns out, is a much more effective accountability system than any grade ever was.
If you’re like me, “code of ethics” has a deep childhood imprint of something handed down in stone, slightly terrifying and not particularly open to discussion. Like there’s already a right answer, and you’re late to it. I’ve failed and barely begun.
Cool, cool.
Well, one way to subvert the inherited heaviness would be to just use AI and ask, “dearest robot-trained-on-the-average-of-all-human-wisdom, tell me what my personal code of ethics ought to be.” It would give me something coherent and polished. I could print it out, slide it into my Minister’s Manual (that’s a thing), and carry on toward ordination with a very convincing document in hand.
Could do, could do.
Except for that whole “cheating yourself” business…
The added layer to this is that from our personal code of ethics, each of us will write the vows we’ll take during ordination. Our Vow of Ministry.
And well, that lands.
If I think about it in the context of a promise - a promise to myself, to others, to the Divine - it helps open up a kind of creative thinking, or creative feeling. Where its not about smite and fury, but more about deeply wanting to see myself and reality clearly. Without editing or softening. Without skipping over the parts that are inconvenient or unfinished.
And when I take that vow, I want it to be true.
No pressure.
I’ve been sitting with this idea of ethics, my own personal code of ‘em, for weeks now. Writing. Crossing things out. Writing again. Pages of notes that feel, at times, both sincere and incomplete. I’m even dreaming about it! I kept circling the same ideas, trying to land on something that felt honest enough to stand on.
And somewhere in the middle of all that circling, came this guiding question:
How do I want to live this one life?
Whew.
Right. This one wild and precious life… how do I want to really live it? How do I want to promise myself that I will?
It ain’t one of those questions you just sit down with a cuppa and boom, there it is. It follows you. It shows up in different moments, asks different things depending on who you’re with, how you’re feeling, oof - what’s at stake.
And on this path toward ordination, with twenty-four days left, I found myself trying to take that question seriously. Something I would actually have to stand inside of.
So I started pull the question itself apart, letting it touch different parts of my life. The big moments, the small ones, the ones I tend to move through quickly without noticing what’s actually happening. Because how we live shows up there. In how we speak. How we respond. How we make decisions. How or if we repair.
And boy oh boy, can I see where I fall short.
Which is part of what has made this process harder than I expected. We were given two months to work on this, and I now have twenty-four days left. Somewhere in the last few weeks, surrounded by drafts and half-formed sentences, I reached a point where I couldn’t tell if I was getting closer or just getting more articulate about the same plethora of ideas.
So instead of trying to land on a finished answer, I started asking myself better questions. And that’s where we’re gonna go today, Friend. I hope you’ll join me in digging in. Feel free to journal on, take a walk with, meditate into:
